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Recent advances in nanoscience and nanotechnology have revolutionized the medical field, particularly in the treatment and prevention of disease. Silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) are considered one of the best supreme and most important nanomaterials with a variety of compulsive nanomaterial having diverse array of multifunctional bioapplications. The current study focuses on the green biosynthesis of AgNPs using polysaccharides extracted from Olea europaea leaves. The synthesized AgNPs were thoroughly analyzed and characterized using various spectroscopic and microscopic techniques including, UV-Vis spectroscopy, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), X-ray diffraction, Energy dispersive X-ray (EDX), and Scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The absorption peak at 440 nm showed a high plasmon resonance band, confirming the formation of green AgNPs by the reduction of Ag+ ions to Ag0. FTIR analysis showed the appearance and extension of different functional groups. The results of EDX and SEM confirmed the synthesis of AgNPs with spherical shape, crystalline structure, and an average size of 64.42 nm. The biosynthesized AgNPs possessed improved antimicrobial activities, indicating the importance of biosynthesized NPs in the pharmaceutical industry. In addition, the biosynthesized AgNPs were biocompatible and exhibited anti-inflammatory activity (86.29%), almost similar to that of a standard drug (87.78%) at a concentration of 500 µL/mL. The polysaccharides obtained from O. europaea could be considered as effective reducing agent, leading to an environmentally friendly synthesis of stable and biologically important AgNPs with a wide range of applications.

Nanomaterials have become integral in various aspects of agricultural practices, including the development of nano-fertilizers for optimized crop nutrition. This study explores the application of green-synthesized iron (Fe) and molybdenum (Mo) nanoparticles, as well as their composites, using a guava leaf extract (GLE). The focus is on assessing their impact on nitrogen fixation and growth in tomato plants (Solanum lycopersicum). The nanoparticles were characterized through Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy, Ultraviolet Diffused Reflectance Spectroscopy, Raman Spectroscopy, and X-ray diffraction analysis. The experiment involved two application methods (soil and direct plant spraying) with varying nanoparticle concentrations. Results indicate that the 1% composite nanoparticles applied to the soil and 3% Mo directly on plants yield the most favorable growth and nitrogen uptake in S. lycopersicum. Notably, the 1% composite treatment demonstrated significant enhancement in shoot length, number of branches, and shoot diameter at all three growth stages. Conversely, the 3% Mo treatment when applied directly to plants exhibited optimal results showing substantial shoot length, number of branches, and shoot diameter. Post-experimental soil nutrient analysis further revealed the nuanced effects of nanoparticle applications with 1% composite treatments enhancing nutrient availability compared to control and other concentrations. This research contributes to the evolving field of agri-nanotechnology emphasizing the importance of nanoparticle concentration and application method in influencing plant development and nutrient uptake, paving the way for sustainable agricultural practices.

The bearings faults are reported to be the major reason for centrifugal pump (CPs) failures. Limited literature is available to diagnose the minor scratches in the bearing surface through non-intrusive condition monitoring techniques. Recent research on the analysis of bearing scratches through non-intrusive motor current analysis (MCA) has shown encouraging results where the comparison of machine learning and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) was performed in the classification of healthy bearings and faulty bearings (holes and scratches). The fault classification accuracy of 89.26% through MCA combination with machine learning and CNN algorithm was reported which is very low. The key factors of low accuracies were identified as low amplitudes of the harmonics in the MCA spectrum, the magnitude of environmental noise, and utilization of conventional feature extraction techniques. This problem has been tackled in this paper by developing a novel feature extractor (NFE) that extracts powerful features from the integrated current and voltage sensors data. The NFE has been derived using the threshold-based decision mechanism which has the capability to identify the location of the feature harmonic, feature extraction, measure the amplitude of the fault component, and compare it with the derived threshold. The experimental data has been collected for the bearing balls (BB), bearing cage (BC), inner race (IR) and the outer race (OR) faults, and the performance of the NFE has been tested on an ensemble classifier (CatBoost) and the better classification accuracy (99.2% for an individual feature and 100% with the combination of two or more features) of NFE has been achieved as compared to previously reported methods.

AISI 316L stainless steel (SS) is one of the extensively used biomaterials to produce implants and medical devices. It provides a low-cost solution with ample mechanical properties, corrosion resistance, and biocompatibility compared to its counterpart materials. However, the implants made of this material are subjected to a short life span in human physiological conditions leading to the leaching of metal ions, thus limiting its use as a biomaterial. In this research, the addition of boron, titanium, and niobium with varying concentrations in the SS matrix has been explored. This paper explores the impact of material composition on modified SS alloy’s physical and mechanical properties. The study’s outcomes specify that the microhardness increases for all the alloy compositions, with a maximum increase of 64.68% for the 2 wt.% niobium added SS alloy. On the other hand, the tensile strength decreased to 297.40 MPa for the alloy containing 0.25 wt.% boron and 2 wt.% titanium additions compared to a tensile strength of 572.50 MPa for pure SS. The compression strength increased from 776 MPa for pure SS to 1408 MPa for the alloy containing niobium and titanium additions in equal concentrations.

The release of phenolic-contaminated treated palm oil mill effluent (TPOME) poses a severe threat to human and environmental health. In this work, manganese-modified black TiO2 (Mn-B-TiO2) was produced for the photodegradation of high concentrations of total phenolic compounds from TPOME. A modified glycerol-assisted technique was used to synthesize visible-light-sensitive black TiO2 nanoparticles (NPs), which were then calcined at 300 °C for 60 min for conversion to anatase crystalline phase. The black TiO2 was further modified with manganese by utilizing a wet impregnation technique. Visible light absorption, charge carrier separation, and electron–hole pair recombination suppression were all improved when the band structure of TiO2 was tuned by producing Ti3+ defect states. As a result of the enhanced optical and electrical characteristics of black TiO2 NPs, phenolic compounds were removed from TPOME at a rate of 48.17%, which is 2.6 times higher than P25 (18%). When Mn was added to black TiO2 NPs, the Ti ion in the TiO2 lattice was replaced by Mn, causing a large redshift of the optical absorption edges and enhanced photodegradation of phenolic compounds from TPOME. The photodegradation efficiency of phenolic compounds by Mn-B-TiO2 improved to 60.12% from 48.17% at 0.3 wt% Mn doping concentration. The removal efficiency of phenolic compounds from TPOME diminished when Mn doping exceeded the optimum threshold (0.3 wt%). According to the findings, Mn-modified black TiO2 NPs are the most effective, as they combine the advantages of both black TiO2 and Mn doping.

In the past century, the world has made a lot of progress and provided comfort in every field of life because of industrialization and the introduction of new technologies. Along with many benefits, industrialization also led to many problems. This industrialization has contaminated the environment including soil, air and water. The addition of heavy metals (lead, copper, cadmium, nickel, etc.) to the soil is hazardous to the ecosystem. Lead is highly contaminating hazardous heavy metal and it is added into the environment by mining, electroplating, pesticides application and discharge of lead batteries. In the current study, the hazardous lead contaminated soil was treated with hyper accumulating Sesbania sesban Linn. plants. To further enhance the growth of S. sesban Linn. and improve its hyper-accumulation ability, a plant growth promoting bacteria (PGPB), i.e. Pseudomonas aeruginosa was used for the seed priming of Sesbania sesban plants. Under Pb stress, P. aeruginosa exhibited a positive effect on physiological and biochemical properties and antioxidant enzymatic activities of S. sesban. Findings of this study revealed that the inoculation of PGPB improves growth attributes such as relative water content and photosynthetic pigments of S. sesban under Pb stress. Inoculated plants decreased accumulation of MDA, proline, and H2O2. Higher accumulation of sugar and protein contents was also observed in P. aeruginosa inoculated plants. Based on obtained data, it may be concluded that the inoculation of P. aeruginosa can reduce Pb stress in soil and can enhance the growth of S. sesban plants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Honey, which is medicinally very important, is the major product of honeybees. The role of the honeybee queen is crucial in maintaining the health and stability of the colony as it is responsible for reproducing and maintaining the population of the hive. Productive and healthy honeybee queens ensure the success of the colony. Various factors, such as parasites, diseases, lack of food and habitat, climate change, genetic defects, and exposure to pesticides, can lead to the failure of the queen bee. Therefore, applications of artificial queen‐rearing techniques in beekeeping positively affect the growth of honeybee queens with desirable characteristics. This current research was conducted at the KUST Model Bee Form of Kohat University of Science and Technology, on Apis mellifera honeybee colonies during spring 2021. In this study, the Doolittle grafting method was used for the rearing of the A. mellifera queen bee. A total of 230 larvae of different ages (12–24, 24–48, and 48–72 h old larvae were used for grafting. Of these 230 grafted larvae, the number of queen cup cells accepted was 139 and the number of emerged queen cup cells was 82. The queen cell acceptance rate was significant (P = 0.000; P < 0.05). The effect of larval age, and the addition of royal jelly in queen cup cells prior to grafting, on the acceptance rate of queen cup cells was also studied. Young larvae, that is, from 12–24 up to 48 h of age, showed high acceptance rates. The acceptance rates of 12–24, 24–48 and 48–72 h old larvae were 76.7%, 55.7% and 20.0%, respectively. This shows that a queen produced from a 1 day old larva has the highest acceptance rate. The addition of royal jelly into queen cup cells before grafting showed the highest larval acceptance rate in March and April. In this study the acceptance rate for queen cup cells with wet and dry grafting were 89.5% and 46.1%, respectively. However further studies are recommended to determine the effect of all factors on the morphology of the queen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conventional open ponding system employed for palm oil mill agro-effluent (POME) treatment fails to lower the levels of organic pollutants to the mandatory standard discharge limits. In this work, carbon doped black TiO2 (CB-TiO2) and carbon-nitrogen co-doped black TiO2 (CNB-TiO2) were synthesized via glycerol assisted sol-gel techniques and employed for the remediation of treated palm oil mill effluent (TPOME). Both the samples were anatase phase, with a crystallite size of 11.09–22.18 nm, lower bandgap of 2.06–2.63 eV, superior visible light absorption ability, and a high surface area of 239.99–347.26 m2/g. The performance of CNB-TiO2 was higher (51.48%) compared to only (45.72%) CB-TiO2. Thus, the CNB-TiO2 is employed in sonophotocatalytic reactions. Sonophotocatalytic process based on CNB-TiO2, assisted by hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), and operated at an ultrasonication (US) frequency of 30 kHz and 40 W power under visible light irradiation proved to be the most efficient for chemical oxygen demand (COD) removal. More than 90% of COD was removed within 60 min of sonophotocatalytic reaction, producing the effluent with the COD concentration well below the stipulated permissible limit of 50 mg/L. The electrical energy required per order of magnitude was estimated to be only 177.59 kWh/m3, indicating extreme viability of the proposed process for the remediation of TPOME.

The reliable and cost-effective condition monitoring of the bearings installed in water pumps is a real challenge in the industry. This paper presents a novel strong feature selection and extraction algorithm (SFSEA) to extract fault-related features from the instantaneous power spectrum (IPS). The three features extracted from the IPS using the SFSEA are fed to an extreme gradient boosting (XBG) classifier to reliably detect and classify the minor bearing faults. The experiments performed on a lab-scale test setup demonstrated classification accuracy up to 100%, which is better than the previously reported fault classification accuracies and indicates the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Downsizing in engine size is pushing the automotive industry to operate compressors at low mass flow rate. However, the operation of turbocharger centrifugal compressor at low mass flow rate leads to fluid flow instabilities such as stall. To reduce flow instability, surface roughness is employed as a passive flow control method. This paper evaluates the effect of surface roughness on a turbocharger centrifugal compressor performance. A realistic validation of SRV2-O compressor stage designed and developed by German Aerospace Center (DLR) is achieved from comparison with the experimental data. In the first part, numerical simulations have been performed from stall to choke to study the overall performance variation at design conditions: 2.55 kg/s mass flow rate and rotational speed of 50,000 rpm. In second part, surface roughness of magnitude range 0–200 μm has been applied on the diffuser shroud to control flow instability. It was found that completely rough regime showed effective quantitative results in controlling stall phenomena, which results in increases of operating range from 16% to 18% and stall margin from 5.62% to 7.98%. Surface roughness as a passive flow control method to reduce flow instability in the diffuser section is the novelty of this research. Keeping in view the effects of surface roughness, it will help the turbocharger manufacturers to reduce the flow instabilities in the compressor with ease and improve the overall performance.

The present study investigates the effect of TiO2 nanoparticles on the stability of Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR)-produced stable emulsion. The chemical precipitation method is used to synthesize TiO2 nanoparticles, and their properties were determined using various analytical characterization techniques such as X-ray Diffraction (XRD), High-Resolution Transmission Electron Microscopy (HRTEM), and Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscopy (FESEM). The effect of TiO2 nanoparticles is evaluated by measuring oil/water (o/w) separation, rag layer formation, oil droplet size, and zeta potential of the residual EOR produced emulsion. The laser scattering technique is used to determine the o/w separation. The results showed that spherical-shaped anatase phase TiO2 nanoparticles were produced with an average particle size of 122 nm. The TiO2 nanoparticles had a positive effect on o/w separation and the clarity of the separated water. The separated aqueous phases’ clarity is 75% and 45% with and without TiO2 nanoparticles, respectively. Laser scattering analysis revealed enhanced light transmission in the presence of TiO2 nanoparticles, suggesting higher o/w separation of the ASP-produced emulsion. The overall increase in the o/w separation was recorded to be 19% in the presence of TiO2 nanoparticles, indicating a decrease in the stability of ASP-produced emulsion. This decrease in the stability can be attributed to the improved coalescence’ action between the adjacent oil droplets and improved behavior of o/w interfacial film. An observable difference was found between the oil droplet size before and after the addition of TiO2 nanoparticles, where the oil droplet size increased from 3 µm to 35 µm. A similar trend of zeta potential is also noticed in the presence of TiO2 nanoparticles. Zeta potential was −13 mV to −7 mV, which is in the unstable emulsion range. Overall, the o/w separation is enhanced by introducing TiO2 nanoparticles into ASP-produced stable emulsion.

Postharvest fungal attacks on fruits such as apricots and loquats are common. Diseased fruit samples were collected from Murree's local fruit markets. The disease‐causing pathogens were identified utilizing molecular, microscopic, and morphological characteristics. Alternaria alternata and Aspergillus niger were identified as the pathogens responsible for brown rot in loquat and black rot in apricot. To combat these fruit diseases, iron oxide (Fe2O3) nanoparticles were synthesized using Bacillus subtilis and were characterized using various techniques. X‐ray diffraction examination validated the size of iron oxide nanoparticles. The presence of several capping agents in the synthesized nanoparticles was confirmed by Fourier transform infrared analysis. Scanning electron microscopy revealed the spherical morphology of nanoparticles, whereas energy‐dispersive X‐ray proved the presence of different elemental compositions. After completing antifungal activities in vitro and in vivo, it was discovered that a nanoparticle concentration of 1.0 mg/mL efficiently suppressed the growth of fungal mycelia. Fungi growth was effectively inhibited in fruit samples treated with 1.0 mg/mL nanoparticles. The results of successful in vitro and in vivo antifungal activities imply that iron oxide (Fe2O3) nanoparticles play an important role in ensuring fruit quality against pathogenic attacks. Bacterial‐mediated iron oxide can be widely used because it is less expensive and less harmful to the environment than chemically manufactured fertilizers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]